About the Authors

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Gisela E. Bahr, born in Landsberg/Warthe (now Poland) in 1923, is Professor of German Emerita at Miami University. Specializing first in the dramatic works of Bertolt Brecht, she later turned her attention to contemporary German literature; area studies of the two Germanies, primarily the GDR; and women's issues. Co-Founder of the International Brecht Society and of Women in German, her hobby is filmmaking. Ute Brandes, Associate Professor of German at Amherst College, is the author of Zitat und Montage in der neueren DDR-Prosa (1984), Anna Seghers (1992), and editor of Zwischen gestern und morgen. DDRAutorinnen aus amerikanischer Sicht (1991). She has written articles on German women writers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, on salon culture, on Goethe's Werther, on Christa Wolf, Ulrich Plenzdorf , and Volker Braun, and is working on a history of Utopian impulses in German women's writing since the Baroque age. Jeanette Clausen is Associate Professor of German and Director of Graduate Liberal Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. She is coeditor of an anthology, German Feminism (1984), and has published articles on Helga Königsdorf, Christa Wolf, and other women writers. She has been coeditor of the WIG Yearbook since 1987. Dinah Dodds is Professor of German at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon and has chaired the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures for the past three years. She is putting together a book based on interviews with twenty-seven East Berlin women about their lives behind the Wall and their experiences since the Wende. Irene Dölling is Professor of Cultural Theory at Humboldt University in Berlin. She is the cofounder and former director (until July 1991) of the university's Zentrum Interdisziplinäre Frauenforschung. Her research interests include twentieth-century cultural theories and theories of gender relations and stereotypes. Her most recent publications include Der Mensch und sein Weib. Aktuelle Frauen- und Männerbilder: geschieht^ liehe Ursprünge und Perspektiven, and an edited volume, Pierre Bourdieu . Die Intellektuellen und die Macht. 176Women in German Yearbook 7 Sara Friedrichsmeyer is Professor of German at the University of Cincinnati, Raymond Walters College. Her publications include The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism (1983) and articles on German Romanticism and nineteenth- and twentieth-century German women writers, as well as a volume coedited with Barbara Becker-Cantarino honoring Helga Slessarev, The Enlightenment and its Legacy (1991). She is coeditor of the Women in German Yearbook. Katherine R. Goodman is Associate Professor of German at Brown University. She has pubished on Rahel Varnhagen, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ellen Key, Gabriele Reuter, and others. Her book Dis/Closures: Women's Autobiography in Germany 1790-1914 appeared in 1986. She has edited two anthologies on women in German literature and, together with Elke Frederiksen, is currently editing an anthology of essays on Bettina von Arnim. Eva Kaufmann studied Germanistik at the Humboldt University in Berlin, where she taught until her retirement in 1991. A major focus of her teaching was world literature for teachers and future teachers. Her publications include literary histories and monographs as well as reviews and journal articles (in, for example, Weimarer Beiträge, Sinn und Form, and neue deutsche literatur). Since 1980, her research efforts have focused on women writers, such as Helga Königsdorf, Irmtraud Morgner, and Christa Wolf. Helga Königsdorf was born in Gera in 1938. She studied physics and mathematics in Jena and Berlin, and became a professor of mathematics at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. She started writing "nebenbei" in the 1970s, and received the Heinrich-Mann-Prize of the GDR Academy of Arts in 1985. Her GDR publications include several volumes of stories (published under different titles in the West): Meine ungehörigen Träume (1978), Der Laufder Dinge (1982), Hochzeitstag in Pizunda (1986), and Lichtverhältnisse (1988), as well as the longer prose work Respektloser Umgang (1986) and an epistolary novel, Ungelegener Befund (1989). Since the fall of the Berlin wall she has published 1989 oder Ein Moment Schönheit. Eine Collage aus Briefen, Gedichten, Texten (Aufbau 1990), which documents her engaged participation in the events of 1989, and Adieu DDR. Protokoll eines Abschieds (Rowohlt 1990), a...